Thursday, May 31, 2012

Today we resume where I left off with
Tuesday's “Designing Undercities” post. (Those late night Google Plus marathon sessions of the Hill Cantons
invariably kick the tar out of my aging butt--but then again you get
what you paid for on this blog.)

Remember the project here is to create
a mapping system that helps wrap your brain around the vast and
complicated spatial dimensions of a full-fledged undercity. I turn to
my old standby in visual organization, the pointcrawl, for some help
here. (Longtime readers may remember that I tried to do this once before in thinking about the Realms Below of Sigil.)

Let's recap the difficulties I was
facing and how a pointcrawl system may help:

Historical layers. Tuesday I
worked through a vertical cross-section method (reposted above). That
process helped immensely in giving me an overall sense of the
relationships and history of the differing phases of the undercity,
but to effectively run it my badly-wired brain is also going to need
some 2D top-down organization. I can capture that kind of mapping fairly easily using only 1-3 letter-sized pieces of graph paper with the pointcrawl method.

Vast areas of empty space.
Remember unlike a megadungeon which typically has a lot of contiguous
space relatively tightly-packed the undercity sprawls both
horizontally and vertically over much larger areas. Outside of a
touch-every-doorknob OCD obsession there really is no need to waste
much time and effort representing them—except for the all important
dimension of where they lead, how much time traversing it takes, and
potential obstacles in that path. In the pointcrawl we solve this by
using a combination of lines and symbols that can tell us at a glance
all the relevant information we need to know.

Losing the best bits. Related to
the above point is the danger of having your most interesting points
from a gaming perspective get swamped by the scale. Instead let's
take each of those sites and mark them on the map with nice big
distinct squares of their own.

Though only represented by a single
abstract square each site will get the full detailed, standard graph
paper mapping. The squares are abstracted units but my usual rule of
thumb is to have a single piece of letter-sized graph paper
correspond to each square. A duller area such as a small, residential
housing may get collapsed into a single sheet with a larger ground
scale and a really interesting or complicated site, especially one
that has distinct sub-levels, may need a second or third sheet to
back it up.

Entry points and vertical
connections get hella confusing. Because
they are big spaces that have seen years and years of habitation (of
varying degrees) the chance of connections from the surface and
between layers is likely to be exponentially higher than a standard
dungeon. While it would likely drive you into a rubber room trying to
capture each and every one, it helps create an interesting array of
explorations options for the players if you have as many as you can
captured. The pointcrawl simplifies the complicated dance of lining
up horizontal with vertical space by treating vertical connections as
simply as the empty spaces: a single line with some simple notation
suffices.

Putting it all together here's
yesterday's sample undercity as represented by a pointcrawl map. Click to enlarge.

Number in circle on line = confusing
passage (twisty catacombs, maze, cavern system, etc) with number
indicating roll for getting lost on a roll or below on a d6. Modify
if party employs precautions such as chalking passages, using
appropriate spells, hiring guide, and the like.

Dot on line = 3 hours of walking at
normal, unencumbered pace along passage.

I have marched through organizing the
physical and conceptual map of my undercity, now we need to get into
dealing with the further complication of this beast being a living,
breathing social animal: the city part of the “undercity”. Look
forward to at least one or more posts picking apart those angle.

Any questions about today's method? Is
it clear what I am trying to do with this and how it fits together?
Suggestions or opinions on how you think this could be done in
different ways?

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Giant subterranean cities piled out far
under the sun-baked city streets. Byzantine, twisty layers of
rubble-choked tunnels (nee roads), cavernous temple fanes, forgotten
palaces piling on top of each other aeon upon aeon.

One of the elements I deeply love about
Tekumel is that hot and forgotten world's vast undercities. In the core play area empire
of Tsolyanu, a long-standing tradition called ditlana in which
cities—at least in theory—are razed every 500 years and built
over. Part sprawling megadungeon, part still-active underbelly of
city life, they have had a fascinating pull on my imagination. Not
surprsingly they have been long something I wanted to incorporate
into my classic D&D campaign, yet I have never been quite able to
pull it over the conceptual hump.

Why? Undercities on a Tekumelyani
scales are seriously spatially-challenging beasts. I've had
small-sized versions for many years, neighborhoods of cities
conveniently bracketed off with cave-in's or very compact and sealed
off little settlements (let me count the number of domed cities
sitting in lakes I stole from the Holmes side-view example). But the
truly sprawling undercity that matches and supersedes the larger
environs of the city it sleeps under? Intimidating.

“...The first level of the Jakállan
Underworld is drawn on a 17” x 22” sheet of graph paper, 10
squares to the inch–and each square is ten feet in measure(!). Thus
it is assumed to cover an area roughly 1700 feet by 2200 feet –
almost 1/3rd by 1/2 a mile in size, centered largely under the ruined
Temple of Hyáshra in the City of the Dead. If you consider the map
of Jakálla, each hex has been said by Prof. Barker to be 50-100
yards across. To be fair, Prof. Barker has also said that the map is
“semi-representational,” i.e. more important buildings appear
larger on the map than they really are. Even so, the top layer of the
Jakállan Underworld would require several 17x22 sheets to cover the
entire city. This suggests that it would be difficult to actually map
the entire Underworld...”

It's just not the horizontal hugeness of such a beast, you
also have any number of other complications to conventional mapping
to deal with: miles and miles of “empty space” (old roads,
side-tunnels, etc.); the vertical dimension of historical layers that
increase the total size many times; large numbers of entry points
from the surface; and of course the potential active use of the upper
levels by humans and other surface dwellers (thus also giving it the
more complicated social dance of urban adventuring).

One could find a massive piece of
architect's graph paper and laboriously fill each exacting section of
your undercity in piece by piece, all the while trying to allow for
the mental trick of knowing that your map still doesn't reach. I'm
not going to do that.

What follows is less tutorial—as you
can tell I am no expert—and more of me grasping for a method in
designing undercities on a grander, more thoroughly thought-out
scale.

Part I: Mapping the Layers

As much as I hate timelines and all the
attendant setting-bloat whoha when tackling a undercity it undeniably
makes for a practical starting point. I work better answering a
series of leading questions while futzing with some kind of
schematic.

How old is the city?

How many civilizations flourished here
and for how long?

I am going to start with a young city
by Tekumel standards, 5000 years, as my world is not quite as
ancient. I am going to say perhaps five different civilizations each
spanning a convenient millennium.

Who first founded it?

How did they order their city? What did
they think was important?

Were they displaced or did they just
evolve historically?

What lead to the city being buried? Was
it a fiery cataclysm, a more gentle abandonment, or intentional
process? Did anything survive on the surface?

How large of a surface area was it when
it was abandoned? What structures survived being buried?

Who replaced these city-dwellers?

[Repeat question set above again and
again until you have finished with each succeeding phase of the
city.]

I take a standard piece of graph paper
and start to draw out length wise the layers as I answer them. My
squares I am going to say are roughly 250 feet a pop to give me room
to work with. I would ratchet these upwards and downwards in scale
depending how vast of a city I want, but the exact ground scale is
really not so important to me as I am mostly just trying to grasp the
overall vertical, horizontal, and historical relationships with this
process.

The founding layer is naturally the
bottom and I place it there. I color code it for use later (blue in
this instance) to help distinguish it from the top layers. I am going
to go with my perennial “lost civilization” favorites from the
Hill Cantons, the Hyperboreans. They constructed a fairly compact
city with cycolpean walls. The city was submerged by a vicious
sorcerous deluge a 1,000 years into its life leaving the large stone
structures encased in a preserving 30-foot thick layer of mud.

The original citadel, high on a bluff,
survives and was incorporated into the next phase of the city (I mark
it on the right and make sure it is visible in my next layer) by the
Latter States who built a broader, yet less grand city on the site.
I draw that layer on my side-view with an orange color and no space
between the layers due to the relative shallowness of the layer.

Exactly 1000 years later, a Space Elf
host burns and ravages the city near completely with only some of the
larger, more durable. This city is larger and far grander than the
other layers with giant plazas, massive pyramids, aqueducts, etc.
Foul serpent women (from the future) encase this city again a 1,000
years into its life in a giant bubble of amber and collapse a
mountain over it for good measure. I draw in a thick layer to
represent the deep burying.

For mysterious reasons known only to
their serpentine minds, the serpent women hollow out a space in the
mountain rubble and construct a massive underground ceremonial space
(colored in maroon) only to abandon it nearly intact after a
millennium. The current human city of Dobre Rajetz rises on this
spot.

And this is what I am left with (click to enlarge) a simple but functional cross section--and more importantly a conceptual idea of what structures, flavor, and size each layer of the undercity has (and roughly where they fit in relationship to each other).

In Part II, I take up exploring how to
use my pointcrawl ideas to capture both the sweeping horizontal and
vertical dimensions of the space.

Friday, May 25, 2012

A funny observation struck me last
night rereading Jack Vance's last Dying Earth book, Rhialto
the Marvelous. By that
book (which was published in 1984) Vance's conception of magic in the
setting seems as much (or more closely) akin to first edition
Stormbringer as it does D&D which famously relies on
“Vancian magic.”

In the first brilliantly-written
editions of SB, all magic is "indirect". The sorcerer only
draws power by summoning and binding elementals, demons, and higher
powers that in turn conduct spell-like effects and “enchant items”
by binding beings into them. The desired effect depends on the
exact nature of the summoned creature and how you employ it. To fly
one summons an air elemental, to create “magic armor” one binds a
certain type of aggressive demon.

It's not a certain or safe process,
naturally those beings can and will resist being pressed into service
and will visit harm on the summoner if given a chance.

In the
foreward of Rhialto, Vance talks about spells being
"codes...inserted [by the mage] into the sensorium of an entity
which is able and not unwilling to alter the environment in
accordance with the message conveyed by the spell...The most pliant
and cooperative of these range from the lowly and frail elementals
through the sandestins. More fractious entities are known by the
Temuchin as 'daihak', which include 'demons' and 'gods'. A magician's
power derives from the abilities of the entities he is able to
control.”

Quite similar, no? (There is a double
irony here in there are any number of examples of direct,
non-summoning-based magic scattered throughout Moorcock's stories to
not fit entirely with the rpg version.)

Curiously this “late Vancian magic”
(the fire-and-forget, more direct-seeming magic of the older versions
of Dying Earth and the Cugel stories seem to play truer
to D&D) is also featured in a very consistent form in the
Lyonesse trilogy which came out around the same time in the mid-80s.
Sandestins and demons again make appearances often expressing a
crankiness and malice against their summoners.

Now contrast this to D&D where the
source of magic is vague and more concerned on the effect until AD&D.
The PHB explicitly rules out arcane magic as coming from
“supernatural beings” and the DMG goes much further in explaining
that spells are tapping into the energies of the Negative and
Positive planes.

I'm far to bought in and lazy to ditch
classic D&D magic altogether, but it does raise all kinds of
interesting opportunities for some variants to supplement it. Perhaps
a variant class, a summoner or sorcerer, that relies purely on this
kind of “indirect magic”? Or a limited sub-range of ritual-like
spells that are more powerful than the normal range of spells, but
rely on navigating the dangers (and potentially amusing roleplaying
opportunities of exchanges) between caster and persnickety
extra-dimensional being?

Sunday, May 20, 2012

Over on Google+ we have an active
thread going on interesting real world underground cross section
maps, an ever-fascinating source of inspiration for me. Photo dumps
are cheap, lazy posts and I rarely inflict them on readers so forgive
me for taking a tour through these before gearing up for the
(supposedly) meatier posts this week.

The
Wieliczka Salt Mine near Krakow is a jaw-dropping place: massive soaring spaces, whole
ghostly cathedrals carved out of salt, and all. I got there a bare
hour before closing time on a trip there in the mid-90s (I lived just
across the border in Slovakia at the time) and had one of the worst
bits of being tantalized in my life of traveling.

This is a beauty of a map (click to enlarge):

Now a more isometric view:

And an actual look down onto one
chamber:

You have undoubtedly seen at least a
little of the vast underground cities of Cappadocia in Turkey, but
they never fail to impress me no matter how many times I take a
gander. To get a sense of the sheer size of the largest of the 36
underground refuge cities, Derinkuyu, check out this bit from
Wikipedia:

“The underground city at Derinkuyu
could be closed from the inside with large stone doors. The complex
has a total 11 floors, though many floors have not been excavated.
Each floor could be closed off separately. The city could accommodate
between 35,000 and 50,000 people and had all the usual amenities
found in other underground complexes across Cappadocia, such as wine
and oil presses, stables, cellars, storage rooms, refectories, and
chapels.”

Friday, May 18, 2012

Picking apart the sometimes brilliant,
sometimes horrific trainwreck that was Lost, the TV show,
never ceases to fascinate me. What gives it an added kick for me is
that I always find something that comes back around to how the Hill
Cantons campaign evolved from being a straight-up, zero-plot West
Marches clone to being the complicated mess of a sandbox bursting at
the seems with literally hundreds of outer and inner mysteries.

I am not sure which was the chicken and
which was the egg, whether I was drawn to the show after developing
elements in the campaign or that the elements came to mirror what I
was watching on the boob tube. The origin is not important, it
happened.

Accidentally through that evolution I
think I may have found something portable to future (and possibly you
the reader's) campaigns .

Let me first turn to a wonderful and
relevant wrap-up critique of Lost from a fellow San Anto
resident on the Ludic blog (well worth checking out here). He wrote:

[Lost] was expert at managing what
Roland Barthes identified as the proairetic code — the sequences
and actions that propelled the reader into the narrative, and the way
those sequences and actions helped impart overall meaning to the
text. The most amazing trick of the proairetic code, one
capable of being mastered by something as low as wrestling or as high
as Shakespeare, is to involve the reader in the creation of the text;
its complexity creates conspiracy, and inspires the viewer to create
narratives where none may exist. This was obvious from the very
beginning with Lost, as it provided us with enough narrative
hooks and background enigmas that we couldn’t help partake in
speculation and theorizing. Thus did it engender a world
even more complex and full of wonder than even the show’s creators
were capable of imagining.”

In other words, the show created the (perhaps illusory) sense that the arc of the series was as much driven by the viewer as it was by the writer. The sheer
tantalizing density of mystery invited--indeed forced--the viewer to make their own
connections and answers. If you substitute player for viewer, and Gamemaster for
writer you see the possible applicability to a sandbox.

Let me recap the campaign's evolution
to bring me back to point. In the beginning there was just pure
site-based evolution. To flavor it up I would throw little weird
setting dress moments in the session for ambiance. Here was a sudden lunar eclipse and mysterious over-flight of massive dark-shrouded
creatures, there a cryptic oracular reading. It was all a facade
really, just something to cover the site-based exploration.

But overtime I found the players
getting more and more into trying to piece together those bits. Why
did the Hyperboreans build a mountain citadel here and a tomb complex 25 miles over there? Why are the runes we are finding matching what we found on the
blue-shining gate on the golden barge? Etc. And as they probed I
started developing answers just ahead of them.

As those just-in-time answers became
more complicated, I worried about the creeping meta-plot and the
inevitable long hand of GM-centered creation. So I tried to develop a
whole process involving index cards to keep it flowing organically
from the bottom, only creating layers to those mysteries when the
players actively sought them (longer, detailed explanation of the
process back here and here). The deeper they dug into the more there was there.

This got a little cumbersome, but I
stuck with it. Every month or so I
would sit down with my notebooks and try and draw connections to all
the multiplying bits in bigger arcs. Looking over all that work this morning, I see
scores of unexplored question marks (some tied into explored ones,
many completely blank other than the trigger) and many more at
varying levels with these morass of arrows connecting them to each
other.

I think the players (I could be
self-deluded and high on my rhetoric) have thrived on this. I love
following the post and intra-session discussions on Google Plus by
players, it's a reward in itself for me. Hundreds of comments pile
up, questions and hypotheses about the what and the why of things
they encountered. Sometimes they are shockingly accurate, down to
what pulp fantasy literary source I obviously jacked this or that
element from. More often they are wildly off, but on occasion their
connections and theories are too rich for me to ignore fully—and
then low and behold partial or full self-fulfilling prophesy occurs.

That activity I believe has deepened
the sandbox experience. It's all good and fun to just have the
non-linearally designed dungeons/wilderness sites and the standard
adventure hooks--and all the rich emergent story to follows out of
play there. I enjoy that in itself too, but I also like having my Big
Whopping Something Going on There cake too and--to mix metaphors
horribly--having the players also help create it is just icing.

In a funny way it distantly mirrors
life. You can coast along fine even having romping fun adventures
without probing much into what makes everything tick. But you might
also start asking hard question. Why isn't it weird that our lives
are dominated by little dirty green slips of paper? What gives that
paper that power? (Or whatever.)

The exploration multiples itself and
channels your sense of meaning of the larger world. By asking on set
of questions one way you find yourself viewing the world in a totally
different light (and one possibly radically divergent from a view
developed by another exploratory series of questions).

And isn't the best fantasy the dream
projection of life with the boring bits cut out?

Monday, May 14, 2012

The road runs crooked here, the braying
radio long since turned off. My mind has retreated to that long
contemplative place, a slower mode that is all about absorbing
details of the countryside. Though the two tons of steel and
fiberglass molding are hurtling through time/space at body-smashing
velocity internally it feels slow and leisurely.

Old stoned piled fence set off against
the gentle curve of a live-oak and cedar covered rise. Great leafy
canopies of pecans and elms as the road drops alongside the white
limestone banks of a muddy, engorged branch river. Riots of
wildflowers bordering old barb-wired posts...and wait is that a herd
of alpacas?

It's Conan Country
too, this long Hill Country backroad runs 15-20 miles parallel with
another that will take you to Cross Plains and Cimmeria. That strong
sense of place in fantasy —my own that just has to happen to share part of Robert E. Howard's
by the accident of birth—washes over me and, of course, I am
thinking of things DnD.

Why is wilderness travel so damn dull
in-game?

Maybe dull is over-strong. Why is it so
consumed with what punctuates the traveling? The throw of a one and
the sudden switch in mode to encounter. Or the mysterious appearance
of a site of interest, the burned out, ivy-choked shell of a tower
and the like. Granted these can be exciting, the stuff of great
sessions.

But why is the land itself left so
faceless? It's “forest” full stop, perhaps grudgingly modified by
being evergreens or light/heavy? It's the brown dull little triangles
of “mountains” arranged in hexagonally-bordered bands. The
wildly-varying and satisfyingly-creepy real world spread of wetlands
is rendered “swamp”.

I look at the posts of my blogging
friends and wilderness is almost inevitably handled as an exercise of
game mechanics, the nerdy little debates (granted that I often love
overly-much too) about how many beancounting checks for encounters
per day over how many beancounting hexes.

Over the years I have managed to both
play and run in a score or more of different wilds in a campaign—on
a rare occasion recently with people who literally in this game from
the first play group—and I've yet to ever feel that you had a
strong sense of the Land you traveled.

The terrain has no face, little nuance
and rarely itself also becomes the adventure. It lacks adversity.
It's tangles and mysteries become obscured by a simple “lost”
check. A horse never dies exhausted of it. A party rarely finds a
spot that “they can't get there from here.” Occasionally you'll
get charts for rockfalls and other impediments, but there seems to
achingly little of it.

I can understand why the stick got bent
this way. Nothing bores a group of players more than waxing into
purple prose for more than five minutes without allowing them to hear
the sound of their own voices. To be sure, it's a game. We fidget
impatiently at the person who spends an eternity agonizing over
whether they build three houses or a hotel on Baltic Avenue. They are
hogging the play experience after all.

Of course I exaggerate for polemical
effect. Everyday we also have examples of Gms breathing life into
that aspect of the game. Why here today is my friend, Michael, giving
some evocative twists to trekking through Grot. So here's my opportunity to turn it back to the positive (crap,
it's only Monday, I can grouse later).

How are you sexing up that wilderness
crawl? Can you impart a feeling of something unique about that land
without achieving eye glazing? How do you make the wilderness itself the adventure? What's your trick?

Monday, May 7, 2012

I finally got around to reading that
letter from Gary Gygax in Alarums and Excursions (July 1975) that was
making the internet rounds recently.

There's are a handful of marginally
interesting historical insights in it (full text here), but the one that I fixated on was this one about a religion in the
original Greyhawk campaign: "I recall...that in Greyhawk we do
not have existing religions included, for this is a touchy area. We
have such groups as "The Church of the Latter Day Great Old
Ones," Church of Crom, Scientist", "Brethren of St.
Cuthbert of the Cudgel", and so on."

Google searches revealed Mike Mornard
saying on Big Purple that he started those running jokes with neutral
characters going to the "First Church of Crom, Scientist",
Lawful characters being "Mitra's Witnesses", and “Chaotic
characters belonged to the "Church of the Latter Day Great Old
Ones" (nee Lovecraft)." Further searches had Rob Kuntz
confirming the actual existence on the Greyhawk city map of the both
the Crom and Old Ones temples.

It's hard not to love that bit from
before fantasy gaming became Serious Business. The mix of pulp
fantasy with absurd humor hits a sweet spot and reminded me of how
vaguely disappointed I was about the mostly dullish deities revealed
in Dragon magazine circa 1983. We had been playing in our own corner
of the published setting for almost three years already with a
strange and eclectic mix of gods and the like, the canonical
“newcomers” seemed so anti-climatic.

Recently we even had the introduction
of a somewhat cargo-cultish brand of medieval Catholicism thanks to
the battlefield conversion of an evil high priest by the
interdimensionally-hopping Father Jack. Vatek, son of Vatek, is not
the best of listeners and throwing into the mix his rarely sober spiritual
mentor and lack of doctrinal materials, he's created a rather
distorted, dionysiac mystery-religion version of worship of the
“Blood Jesus.” With nun-maenads and a small flock gathering
around him I am sure this is going nowhere serious.

That the events above were player-triggered gets me around to my second point. One of the exceptions to
my disappointment with the Greyhawk canonical deities were the
“quasi-deities”, mythic heroes just below demi-gods in status.
Some of them were explicitly mentioned as having been PCs in the
original campaign such as the gunslinger and swordsman Murlynd, a
character of TSR co-founder Don Kaye.

Those mentions and the half-page
section in the first DDG on “Divine Ascension” (which is a
surprisingly easy if power-gamey process by the book) totally grabbed
us at the time. Our “end game” was never really about carving out
a wilderness hold—though we did that—but about that megalomanical
drive to ascend to demi-god status. In retrospect it seems nuts, but
it was there and there in spades in how we played around that time.

Now obviously the BECMI series would
come along and institutionalize that as the ultimate power arc, but
do others remember the earlier reach for the stars? Did it play a
role, even if just a distant and never-obtained carrot (as it was for
us, fortunately)?

Saturday, May 5, 2012

For a little over
a year, I have heard a number of Midwestern friends talking in hushed
tones about a great horde of Arneson's papers, manuscripts and gaming
who-ha lifted out of a sealed storage shed in Minnesota.

Now in the
hands of an rpg auction house, an undoubtedly white-hot bidding war
is about to commence--and thus my case of the sads. A golden
opportunity to regain missing pieces of the early history of our
hobby once again slips out of the public domain and eye and into the
hands of private collectors.

Looking through
the pictures over at the GeekDad exclusive, it's hard not to notice
how great of a loss we are talking about. Just take a gander of the
pictures of a spread of the Domesday Book, the near-lost newsletters
of the medieval wargaming Castle and Crusade Society that D&D
sprung Athena-like out of the head of. Pre-D&D details of
Blackmoor are among some of things covered in the issues. And that
leaves out all the unpublished manuscripts found in there.

This is not a rant
against private collectors per se. I have known several collectors
who have a profound love of the game and its history. Some like
Harami who drop by to provide real insights into the grand
experiments of that day. I sincerely hope that one such collector has
an eye to sharing highlights and missing links with the rest of us
“fever pitch” fans.

It's hard not to
be with GeekDad in openly pining for a public archive to swoop in
like this and help preserve it for the long haul.

Compare
to what happened with the legacy of one of other hobby giants, M.A.R.
Barker (who serendipitously is being mourned and celebrated as I type
by our friends up in Minnesota). Again you had a giant collection of
gaming history, but instead of auctioning it off, it was donated to
the Tekumel Foundation (assisted by the Aethervox Gamers).

That collection is being carefully archived and restored with the ultimate eye of being
accessible to lovers of that great world-building effort. It's not a
theoretical push, we've already seen the re-release of the pre-TSR
1974 manuscript of Empire of the Petal Throne. Several more
historical documents including the early-awaited Jakallan underworld
are coming down the pipe.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

One of the difficult things I am
finding about digging into the 1st ed. DMG for Talmudic
readings on domain-level play is that I keep finding funky sections
that spin me off into long thought-train tangents. Today I raise the
white flag and give into temptation and look at two of the ones I
just can't get unstuck from my cranium.

Monsters and Organization. Nestled
into page 104 is one of my favorite bits of Gygaxian pedagogy. The
take-home messages here provide solid advice: think deeply about the
intelligence, alignment, and social organization of the adversaries
that players face and create contingency plans and strategies for
dealing with interlopers. The numerous examples are also pure gold, showing a range of monsters and how they cope with not just one
sortie by the PCs but several.

Now here's the part that struck me as
both strange and poignant:

“It is necessary that you make a rule
to decide what course of action the monsters will follow BEFORE the
party states what they are going to do. This can be noted on the area
key or jotted down on paper. Having such notes will save you from
later arguments, as it is a simple matter to show disgruntled players
these 'orders' when they express dissatisfaction with the results of
such an encounter [my
emphasis].”

Strange
because..well...you know, can you imagine this actually happening at
your table in the here and now? It struck me how far the
competition-adversity paradigm in rpgs has shifted—even among “old
school” circles. I've certainly faced the cocked eyebrow of
skepticism from players, the little subtle body language that sounds
off, but I can't imagine ever taking out my notebook opening it up to
the chicken scratchings of my fevered mind and pointing to prove that
they face an “objective reality”. And I certainly could never
imagine players feeling entitled to see it.

That
said I'm not sure it's all sunny upward progress to have ditched it.
The trust that comes with maturity certainly is but I still like the
idea of both the semi-adversity of the GM (I've written about this
before here and here)--and having the “fairness” of a tough-knocks situations that can be "won".

Now I
am way too much of a seat of the pants bullshitter to have complex,
written SOPs for each and every monster situation, but I do quite
often set up some naturalistic sketchy orders that I try like hell
not to breach the faith of in-game. Usually they are expressed as a
range of broad probabilities around courses of action. Something
like: “Roll d10, 2d6 space elves 1-3 are laying an ambush back at
a good spot in the dunes, 4-6 hunting the players when they get back
to town, 7-8 holing up in their current position, 9-10 sending back
to the Bizarro Hill Cantons for 2d6 reinforcements, roll again.”

Somewhere
down in the recesses of my DM reptilian brain I must have bought back
into this. I freely admit it's a weird principle to get hung up on,
so I'm curious as to how readers feel about it. Is this in your
ballpark of actual practice or some strange vestigial thing you've
long since evolved past?

Other NPCs. Turn over to the
page before the last one to the last subsection on running NPCs. Most
of this is is quite dull and unremarkable until...

“The host of merchants, shopkeepers,
guardsmen, soldiers, clerics, magic-users, fighters, thieves,
assassins, etc. are likewise all yours to play...These NPCs will have
some alignment, but even that won’t be likely to prevent a bit of
greed or avariciousness. Dealing with all such NPCs should be
expensive and irritating.”

A throwaway sentence but one that packs
a lot of Vance in there. Lovers of Jack Vance's work know that one of
the enduring themes of his work is that great chunks of humanity are
either “marks” or “hustlers” (broadly speaking since many of
his protagonists are shrewd but moral actors). Whether it's one of
his space operas, planetary romances, or fantasy novels time and time
again you see the picaresque travel punctuated by complicated
swindles and counter-swindles “in town”.

The two-paragraph example given after
this not only reinforces that but—ignoring all the Welsh-sounding
name dress--is a golden little window into what looks like actual
play in Lake Geneva. Here you have a witless PC, Celowin
Silvershield, waltzing into a “strange town” trying to get one of
his buddies unpetrified.

He has an annoying time at the tavern
getting unhelpful advice (which he has to pay for with drinks) and
then has a run-in with an even-more annoying beggar (and pays him
off). Then he has to deal (pay off) with a swarm of beggars before
even making it to the mage's tower. There he has to deal with a
jack-ass gate keeping warlock just to meet with the wizard—just in
time to royally piss him off by spoiling his arcane experiment. And
if he can't pay the exorbitant sum he gets geased into another
adventure.

Love it.

Town should be
expensive and irritating. It should be a place for pulply fleecing
and being fleeced. It should be a place that makes you want to get
what you need, gear up and hightail it back to the next murderhole or
wilderness death march.